Interpretation of Silence in Paul Celan’s Holocaust Poetics

To discuss in the light of Theodre Adorno’s reconsideration of his own dictum – “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” – Paul Celan’s Holocaust-born epochal art restates “only poetry is possible after Auschwitz”. The Shaoh stands as a testimony of the most painful endurance in history thus permanently fracturing the self-confidence especially of many Jews and their belief in the “Biblical Chosenness”. The consequent literature of continuing silence with a guilt of survival has redefined the term suffering especially in the poetry of Paul Celan which if turned out to be the “last inarticulate babble” had the merit of silencing words into a condensed metaphoric image of recurring complexity that finally brings out a paradoxical message with a strange “capacity to have the incapacity to speak”. Unlike the poetry of the Romantics which was verbally vociferous, Celan’s was more so with silence being a displaced being like a blurred horizon between the Pre-Holocaust land and the Post-Holocaust sky. Silence as a form of dense literary genre which is like “a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea” in Celan’s poetry starts at the periphery of Auschwitz cries. Ironically enough his suicide culminates in this mission. His metaphoric voice sets out for excavation of memories in Shoah painfully encountering aphasia with a parallel pursuit for a language that replays the action and music of the perpetual death in the still fresh picture of ash-flake rain or charred chunks of human flesh. Celan explored the darkest domains of human history with a polysemeous canon and systematically constructed the art of silence as an emerging literary consequence where the words become cryptic, fractured and attain what Gilles Deleuze and Guttari said: “the becoming minor of the major language”.